Crowdfundingwebsites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are bang-up for bands trying to finance an album or autonomous filmmakers hop-skip to scud a motion-picture show . But it ’s interesting to see these alternative finance tools being used more and more for projects that are often colligate with large public institutions — namely , monument and museum .
Last class , a chemical group in Detroit put forward over $ 67,000 to build up aRobocop statue . And as of this writing Matthew Inman of the popular webcomicThe Oatmealhas raised over $ 700,000 ( of his $ 850,000 goal ) to build aTesla Museum . Trevor Owens , a digital archivist with the Library of Congress , had an interesting post on his personal blog last hebdomad about why ethnic heritage organizations should be paying tight attending to thesenew methods of financing .
But crowdfunding a repository is n’t an all new theme . In 1922 , Hugo Gernsback hoped to work up a memorial and museum in New York dedicate to the artificer of the phone , Alexander Graham Bell . Gernsback ’s magazine , Science and Invention , was especially democratic with amateur inventors so he brought his appeal directly to them in the October 1922 outlet , just two months after Bell ’s destruction in August .
From the October 1922 issue of Science and Invention cartridge clip :
Somewhere alongside Riverside Drive , New York , or some other large point , a repository in the signifier of a telephony liquidator , from 200 to 250 feet high-pitched , should be erected , somewhat along the lines of the intent show . The Monument would be built completely of pitch-dark marble or disconsolate granite .
The Department of the Interior would be hollow , with the exclusion of the foundation on which the imitation telephony receiver rest . This bottom section could be fitted out as a museum with all the diachronic models of Dr. Bell ’s inventions , which could be houses here for the welfare of visitors and student .
This , if you hark back , was n’t the only memorial Gernsback require to build . Also in 1922 Gernsback proposed building a1,000 foot tall monument to electricity . He hop the monument would endure as a testament to future civilizations , explaining precisely what technical breakthroughs had been accomplished in the early twentieth hundred . Sadly neither repository was ever built , though Bell does havehis own monument in Brantford , Ontario , Canada which was completed in 1917 , well before his death in 1922 . Bell also has his ownmuseum in Baddeck , Cape Breton , Nova Scotia . The United States does have theVolta Laboratory and Bureauin Washington , D.C. , though it was built by Bell himself in 1893 .
This post originally appeared atSmithsonian.com .
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